Serious Games - A means to develop Project Management Competences

Project managers are increasingly challenged with skills that require management
of multi-cultural and distributed teams that go beyond the technical project
management skills. The challenges emphasize the importance of soft skills such as
communication, leadership, building trust and decision making. Decision making is
one of the important aspects of project management. Improving the ability of project
managers to make appropriate decisions at right time can make a substantial
positive difference in project work environments. The aim of this paper is to discuss
serious games as an effective means of competence development, with a focus
on developing decision making competence, for project managers. We present an
approach for describing project management competences, which takes into account
an individual's abilities and personality, knowledge, organizational factors
and environment factors that define a specific situation; the OKEI (Organisation,
Knowledge, Environment and Individual) competence modelling framework. We
will present descriptions of soft skills in project management – decision making
as an example – and discuss how serious games can contribute to support rapid
competence development for project managers.